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Dayton Daily News - 9/18/99
Carol Simmons
Bob
Pollard hasn’t been able to spend much time with the- hometown crowd lately,
and he seemed to enjoy the chance to connect with the locals gathered Sunday at
the University of Dayton Arena for X-Fest ‘99.
Pollard’s
band, Guided by Voices, was one of eight national acts performing Sunday at the
daylong rock concert.
The
long-running band is on an extended tour supporting its first record with TVT
Records, Do the Collapse.
Dressed
in worn green corduroy slacks, a maroon twill work-shirt and dark sneakers and
carrying around a trademark Budweiser, Pollard hung out for a while on the edges
of the backstage area following GBV’s 30-minute set.
A
private chat with Citizen King’s lead singer was interrupted by a fan
calling from the other side of the chain-link fence that separated the backstage
from the concert grounds.
“Hey!
Bob! Hey! Smoking cigarettes, drinking my brand onstage. You’re my man! Would
you sign my T-shirt?”
“Sign
your what?” Pollard hollered back.
“My
T-shirt, man,” the bare-chested guy replied.
Pollard
was already on his way over. Leaning into the fence to hear above the roar of
Fastball, which was onstage at the moment, Pollard laughed and talked with the
man as an eager crowd formed.
Men,
women, old timers, young people, they offered up T-shirts, paper scraps and body
parts for Pollard to sign. The 41-year-old singer-songwriter, former elementary
schoolteacher and onetime local sports star happily obliged.
“Oh,
my God,” squealed one young woman. “We lived down the street from each other
two houses. Oh my God”
He spent a good 20 minutes with the crowd, before his crew, sporting blue
T-shirts emblazoned in. yellow letters with “Teenage FBI,” starting gigging
him to finish up. (Teenage
FBI is a song on band’s
latest album.)
They were ready to go, but Pollard hesitated. There were still fans waiting to
see him, and he didn’t want to cut them off.
“I
had a great time,” he said after finally pulling himself away. “It’s
always good to come back and play at home.”
On
tour since early July, GBV has most recently been on the road with Cheap Trick.
Word that he’d joined Cheap Trick the night before, per Cheap Trick’s
invitation, to sing that band’s hit Surrender,
wasn’t quite right, Pollard said. “It was Southern
Girls. And they didn’t invite me, I just went up. Later they called me
back to sing Surrender, but I wasn’t
paying attention.”
He
screamed himself hoarse during the course of the show, which was fun at the
time, he said. But when he woke up Sunday morning, just hours before he was to
take the X-Fest stage, he didn’t have a voice. Not being able to have appeared
at X-Fest would have been really bad, he said in somewhat more colorful
language.
His
voice soon returned, however, and he was able to do the show.
And
it felt good, he said.
Asked
to compare the performance to the band’s first X-Fest appearance three years
ago, when it was called Edge-Fest, Pollard replied: “It feels exactly the
same. It looks exactly the same. It’s the same place. Same people. Even the
stage is the same.”
Then
he became more reflective. “I’m more confident now, more comfortable,” he
said. “And I much more content with my band.”